


A Clear Unclouded Night

by gogollescent



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Barrayaran attitudes towards consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 17:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/713044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Stephen Maturin takes imprisonment at the hands of Captain Vorvilliers with equanimity, but runs aground on the life-affirming conversations about feelings part of introductory-level Stockholm Syndrome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Clear Unclouded Night

Dr. Stephen Maturin, formerly of the Betan Astronomical Survey vessel _René Magritte,_ now of a Barrayaran war hero until she should choose to release him, contemplated on blue cheese dressing and oatmeal. To the medical mind they recalled infection, especially after a few days' storage in his pockets: heat and enclosure had made the dressing in particular runnier than he would have thought possible.

“Pus,” he said aloud.

It was ill-timed. Captain Vorvilliers, returning from an expedition to collect dry plantstuff, regarded him with something like despair. “Your leg?”

“Not at all, not at all,” he said reassuringly, once he'd realized her mistake. “No, I meditate on the liquidity of our dinner. The wound continues clean.” Or as clean as could be wished for from a ring of sucker-marks left by a vampiric balloon, but Stephen was hopeful for metabolic triumph, and although clotting had been slowed, concomitant to some form of anticoagulant in the extremities of the organism, the blood was at last beginning to crust around the edges of the holes. “No; only a metaphor. Though indeed extreme monotony of diet may take on the aspect of a disease.”

Vorvilliers nodded, and with a last considering look at her pile of kindling shot the ground. Blue fire sprang from the eager wood and cast her smudged face in high relief, white skin laid with cobalt shadow. Her eyes were more vivid than the cornflower flames. Maturin, a dual citizen of Beta and Komarr before the annexation, had had numerous dealings with High Vor, and he was used to their severe brand of darkhaired good looks; but although Vorvilliers was in most respects the very pattern of her caste, she had eyes that would have been remarkable even at Beta Colony, where a five minute surgery could print your spouse's name in lacing gold round the ring of the iris. Among the grey- and dark-eyed military aristocrats of the Empire they must stand out like embers on a terrain of ash.

It was not the sort of thought he made a habit of entertaining about the enemy, and he renewed attendance on his oatmeal, aware of her gaze.

“Doctor,” she said, “do you have family?”

Stephen disliked questions of this kind. He was by nature secretive, and of the opinion that information not freely given was cheaply sought. Something in her expression, however, made him answer. “A godfather,” he said, “and any number of cousins, last time I took stock. Are you wondering whose formal complaints you will have to suffer through if I succumb to my injuries? You may tell them I was trying to document a quite unprecedented species; they will understand you perfectly.”

She snorted and moved closer to the flames. “Actually, I was wondering—well, never mind. You're a stubborn brute, Maturin, upon my honor. I've told you you'll be exchanged alive, haven't I?”

“Several times,” he said, “with increasing emphasis, as one who would convince one's self of the infeasible.” He spoke lightly; he did not in truth mistrust her. Unwise, perhaps, but she had the ingenuity of the carelessly brave, and he was more concerned for the threat her mutinous crew represented than the possibility that she would hand him over to one of the several Barrayaran agencies less concerned with interplanetary relations.

“Do not be such a damned quibbler,” said Vorvilliers. She held out her empty hands to the heat over the periphery of the woodpile, weapon laid down at her side. If it hadn't been for the fire between them, he could have reached across and seized it--might even have been faster than her service-honed reflexes, for she was visibly tiring, and if Dr. Maturin had a warrior's virtue it was speed. Then, too, he could have run while she was in the copse, collecting fallen branches; Dubauer had recovered enough to be herded. She would have caught them, sure, but it would have shown proper defiance. In short he was awash in opportunities to ruin, breach, or destroy beyond hope of remembrance the doubtful peace that had sprung up between them; and he had taken none. Detachedly he could almost regret it.

“And you?” he said despite himself. “Do you still claim any soul kin?”

She darted a look his way that he found impenetrable. “Cousins,” she said, “like you. Unfortunately they come with an aunt, but I hardly count her.”

Stephen thought of a friend who would have pounced upon the chance to make a pun--something relating her uncounted aunt and the Counts of the Vor--and felt a pang. He did his best to suppress it: Jack Aubrey, for all his gifts, had no place in this strange, firelit scene, with dusk gathering on an alien sky and the percolation of stars a present reminder of their lonesome extremity. Stephen was glad and more than glad that Jack had never come on the survey ship at all, to be shot like Rosenburg or addled like Dubauer, stumbling silent through a paradise to which he was wholly blind. Never mind that Stephen, for a moment, wanted him near so very badly that the now-blond tongues of the flames seemed to effect a secret taunt. Never mind that Jack was Barrayaran as well, mercenary or not, and if he had been here he would by necessity have been on Vorvilliers' side.

“I was married, too,” she said, and watched for his response.

Very likely his surprise showed on his face. It was not part of the stories that had made it to Betan news sources about her actions in the war with Cetaganda, and transcendental gowns worn to victorious celebrations after. And he had been, due to the nature of his early interests, a more assiduous gatherer of available information about the notables of Barrayar than most, though that time was now past.

“I was married,” she repeated. “Lieutenant Vorvilliers, my entry into the service—I followed him, d'you see, and made a name for myself that way, when things went wrong for Vorkosigan. I was trained at the Academy, but not many women who come out of it do more than teach, even now. I didn't want that.”

“No,” said Stephen, looking closely at her.

“So there we were, when the war was done—not that it'll last, and damn the bastards—living it up in Vorbarr Sultana, two fêted veterans and well-off to boot, if you'll excuse my coarseness, Maturin; we were very much loved. That was the problem, I suppose: it went to my head. I did care for him, you know, in my own way; they say I didn't, and sometimes I believe—but here, I'm babbling. You must stop me,” she said, glancing over in a way quite removed from their circumstances, as though they were the oldest of friends, and equals, neither pursuant nor pursued. “You must be firm, doctor, when I go on.”

“I'm listening,” said Stephen. He was inclined to be glad that he and not she had been injured in the tussle with the radials on the river, not wishing to shoulder responsibility for his captor's well-being; but now he wondered if she was not sustaining some earlier concussion, some lingering trauma that made her too talkative and too ready to stray.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose you are. Well, the money did not last. I had land; he only had his stipend. He was a great gambler, and at last he fell in with a bad crowd, a bunch of discontents and traitors—pacifists, if you would credit it, and separatists too.” She did not specify what they wished to see separated. No doubt to her undiscerningly patriotic mind all secession was treasonous. She was silent for a moment, and he worried she had seen some flicker of amusement on his face; but she seemed rapt in her inner narrative, moving only to stir the coals. “He began to use me,” she said. “As a shield against ImpSec, and and as a messenger—would have me go to little gatherings, 'which he could not attend', and that was some kind of flag, some kind of notice. I'm not a fool.”

“Never in life,” Stephen murmured, thinking of how easily she had been persuaded to take Dubauer.

“Well,” she resumed, “it could not go on. He was involved in an assassination attempt on Admiral Vorkosigan. Negri, of all people, took me aside to say I must break from him or be implicated, and better to break—they would make me break, if they had to, because I was popular and so useful to them, too. Because at least one symbol of our victory ought to be preserved.”

She paused and turned to look into the dark. From the side her face was perfect and unmarred by the faint scarring that rose along the right half of her jaw; her features blurred, however, from want of sleep and the involvement of the wavering air, glassy above the flames.

“I told them I could do better. And that night, you know, when he came home, I shot him with a plasma arc—burnt his face clean away.”

He moved involuntarily, a whole-body start; she saw it, and rose to her feet, smooth as though she had not walked twenty miles with Dubauer leaning on her—Stephen being too short to support the shattered ensign. She was quite beautiful, slim in her battered uniform and brilliant in her stillness, almost a shadow at this angle but still embroidered by points of light. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I have disturbed you. I did not mean to—I did not mean to.” She lied like someone who did not believe herself, the first time she had done so that he had observed.

“My dear sir,” he said, “sit down. You do not trouble me an ounce. I only felt a pain in my calf, my rebellious calf. That was what startled me.”

She stared at him, as well she might have; but he was a better liar than her even in his own shortfall of conviction, and after a beat's uncertainty she nodded, quite abrupt. “Let me see,” she said, which he had not expected, but before he could protest she had come round to kneel at his side, and roll his trouser leg up. She had reholstered her arc without his noticing its resumption. Her hands, hard on his knee, were very sure.

“Will I tell you about a friend of my own, now?” he said, when she had done with her cursory examination, the duration of which he patiently abided by imagining that he was stone. She settled back, curiosity poorly veiled, and he continued: “A Komarran man, a former revolutionary I am afraid; like your husband, much given to treason, not through any great fault of his own but a sort of invidious descent. He loved a fight; that was his folly—” skepticism on the lovely face of the Barrayaran captain, the winner of how many battles and murderer of more men than he had probably ever cured— “his weakness, let us say.” No mention of the fact that Stephen, too, had once joined a revolution, and loved a duel. He thought of Cetaganda, the ghem-lords toppled, that waste and that great beauty; he did not mourn the haut or (much) their banks of jeweled genes, but he had been very sick of the killing, toward the end. Paranoia overtaking liberty. “His name was Dillon, and when I met him he was first lieutenant aboard a mercenary's ship. But it did not suit him, you know: he liked the blood, but he was still too much given to ideals, even after he left his revolution behind. He had a very great contempt for anyone who killed for money. In the end he died boarding an Escobaran vessel—I do not remember how they got aboard, some feint or stunt no doubt, something disgusting to his sympathies—he led the charge, nevertheless, and received nerve damage to the brain. Rather like poor Dubauer here, but with no chance. No chance at all. Though there was a moment, in my sickbay, when I thought I might save him.”

Vorvilliers said, “Would he have thanked you, if you had?'

“No,” said Stephen. “Never in life.” He felt cold, as though the fire had receded from the skin of the night; as though he had cut himself off from all the not inconsiderable sources of warmth with which he was surrounded, the coals and the crawling inhabitants of the world and Vorvilliers' near body, close and contained. When she kissed him, he shivered, convulsive as though some poison had entered into the bloodstream after all—had reached his heart at last, coursing through narrow veins. He tried to draw off, but she was determined, hands and mouth not to be denied by merest distance; she took his head and held it fast, opened his lips, licked heat into his tightening throat. It was so swift and deep he might have fallen into an inexorable current, foaming water, except for the ground hard under him and her grip on his skull.

“And here I thought,” he said at last, “that I had discovered the one Barrayaran officer in whose clutches I'd be quite safe from ravishment.”

“Actually,” said Diana, words at his ear and wet, “you're not their type. Too dark and measly.”

“Strapping blond Ganymedes?” said Stephen, thinking of Jack.

“If they can get it,” said Diana, and reached to undo the fastenings of his jacket. He stopped her wrist. It was a forceless gesture, but without a second's break Diana raised her gun from her side and held it to his head, clean and instinctual, before dropping her hand in evident horror.

“Quite so,” said Stephen, with his fingers smoothing the disarranged epaulette on her shoulder. “I'm sorry. But it can't be managed.” Silent, she slid away. He thought of adding a word to that judgment—'after the prisoner exchange', perhaps—but the likelihood of such a whim ever striking her without it was dark and they were lost in a wilderness, made confessional by the newness of their knowledge of one another and the certainty that it would end, was so slim as to make the thought obscene; besides, he did not know that there would be an exchange, that they would reach the safety cache, that she would re-commandeer her ship and that he would not be identified, if she did, as a sometime politico and spy. He gripped her hand. “I am not insensible, however, to the honor you do me—” she kissed him again, alas; kissed him and kissed him, beneath the heartless stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't even try to look the timeline in the eye, of course, but I do apologize for making Cetaganda France.


End file.
